OS Malware

[longen]

Details of a home-grown computer operating system developed by North Korea have emerged - Further analysis by a government institute in neighbouring South Korea said the operating system is aimed at monitoring user activity.

[news.bbc.co.uk ]

[lgn1]

Yeah, it's called Red Star.

I got to get a copy as a joke.

I didn't even think that North Korea had internet, except for maybe the leadership.

Maybe the rest of the world can make a project of cleaning up Red star, removing all that spyware, so North Koreans can surf with privacy.

[graeme_p]

It shows how well the BBC checks it stories when it claims that a Linux based OS comes with "with versions of the software giant's Office programmes".

MS Office for Linux, that much bigger news than Red Star, if it was true!

Maybe the rest of the world can make a project of cleaning up Red star, removing all that spyware, so North Koreans can surf with privacy

As its almost certainly just a remix of one of the major distros, removing the spyware is probably relatively easy (as you can run through the changes, rather than analysing the entire OS), but how will you distribute the clean version in a place like that?

[lgn1]

MS Office for Linux, that much bigger news than Red Star, if it was true!

Perhaps its running on top of wine.

[en.wikipedia.org ]

You could probably sneak a clean version in from CHINA. Or maybe we can airdrop them instead of leaflets. Hey maybe we can get AOL to fund the airdrop, with a free AOL CD including 100 hours of dial-up, with the airdrop of redstar:)

[Readie]

Hey maybe we can get AOL to fund the airdrop, with a free AOL CD including 100 hours of dial-up

Lol.

I remember those, for some odd reason 3 members of my immediate family (all under one roof) recieved one every time they came, we never used them, but I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have finished the first few by the time the next lot came around.

[graeme_p]

Perhaps its running on top of wine.

The original blog post [ashen-rus.livejournal.com] mentions OpenOffice (one of the few bits of latin lettering on the page) and the screen shot looks like Open Office to me.

The journalist did not know the difference between MS Office and Open Office. Some other sites describe it as a "knock-off" of MS Office. Presumably because everyone "knows" that MS invented wordprocessers and spreadsheets and operating systems and PCs.